The Intel G45 chipset was released in the summer of 2008, but only this week is it now possible to take advantage of VA-API video playback acceleration for this Intel integrated graphics processor.

Intel has been working on G45 VA-API acceleration support for quite a while and had already delivered Arrandale / Clarkdale VA-API H.264 support and even more recently Video Acceleration API support for the latest Intel Sandy Bridge hardware, but they've now gone back to finally deliver on their G45 Linux support promise.

Created this week in the public libva repository for the VA-API library is a g45-h264 branch. This code branch contains this code commit that touches over 1,000 lines of code in the i965 VA-API driver for supporting H.264 decoding on Intel G4x series hardware. This is currently limited to a single thread, but it's publicly available for those interested. It doesn't appear that any Intel DRM driver update is required on the kernel side to take advantage of this video playback acceleration on the older hardware.

This work should allow more of the H.264 video playback process to be offloaded to the Intel 4-Series IGP rather than the CPU directly for multimedia applications that support the VA-API interface.

The Intel Sandy Bridge hardware not only has the full realm of VA-API support for video decoding, but it also supports VA-API video encoding too. Don't expect VA-API encoder support, however, to come to older generations of Intel hardware.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our Amazon.com shopping link when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip or Bitcoin.